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Kevin Trenberth to Michael Mann, Oct 12, 2009:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Kevin Trenberth to Tom Wigley, Oct 14, 2009

Hi Tom
How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where
energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not
close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is
happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as
we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!
Kevin

Leo Tolstoy

“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

Phil Jones

“We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.” -

Phil Jones to Michael Mann Feb 21, 2005:

The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick.
Leave it to you to delete as appropriate !
Cheers
Phil
PS I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data.
Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !

Tom Wigley to Phil Jones Sep 27, 2009:

If you look at the attached plot you will see that the
land also shows the 1940s blip (as I'm sure you know).
So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC,
then this would be significant for the global mean — but
we'd still have to explain the land blip.
I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an
ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of
ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common
forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of
these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are
1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity
plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things
consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.
Removing ENSO does not affect this.
It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip,
but we are still left with "why the blip".
Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol
effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced
ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling
in the NH — just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols.
The other interesting thing is (as Foukal et al. note — from
MAGICC) that the 1910-40 warming cannot be solar. The Sun can
get at most 10% of this with Wang et al solar, less with Foukal
solar. So this may well be NADW, as Sarah and I noted in 1987
(and also Schlesinger later). A reduced SST blip in the 1940s
makes the 1910-40 warming larger than the SH (which it
currently is not) — but not really enough.
So ... why was the SH so cold around 1910? Another SST problem?
(SH/NH data also attached.)
This stuff is in a report I am writing for EPRI, so I'd
appreciate any comments you (and Ben) might have.
Tom.

Tim Osborn to Michael Mann and Ian Macadam , Oct 5, 1999:

Dear Mike and Ian
Keith has asked me to send you a timeseries for the IPCC multi-proxy
reconstruction figure, to replace the one you currently have. The data are
attached to this e-mail. They go from 1402 to 1995, although we usually
stop the series in 1960 because of the recent non-temperature signal that
is superimposed on the tree-ring data that we use. I haven't put a 40-yr
smoothing through them - I thought it best if you were to do this to ensure
the same filter was used for all curves.

Keith Briffa:

Briffa:
For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually
>warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming
>is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth
>was probably matched about 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global
>mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of
>years as Mike appears to and I contend that that there is strong evidence
>for major changes in climate over the Holocene (not Milankovich) that
>require explanation and that could represent part of the current or future
>background variability of our climate. I think the Venice meeting will be
>a good place to air these isssues.

A

Arctic, temperatures

Humlum/HadCrut: Arctic temperatures north of 70N. Temperatures today are comparable to the 1925-45 level. We should expect Arctic sea ice to respond to heat today the same way as in 1924-45. Again, it is har to interpret the Arctic sea ice as if we had a “point-of-no-return” situation, a tipping point. After all, Arctic ice has had no problems regaining size after 1925-45. What is puzzling is, that some researchers apparently believes that Arctic ice today should react differently than in 1925-1945?

There are many attempts to present Arctic temperatures as if we are witnessing a dramatic extraordinary heat trend. Thus you often see presentations of Arctic temperatures where the Arctic has been extended to comprise the warmer city stations down to 60N or 64N. When these kind of “Arctic illustrations” shows more warming trend we can conclude that it’s the 60N-70N that shows a bigger warming trend, not the Arctic Ocean. No, the Arctic is best illustrated by limitin to 70-90N, that is, without cities.

AND! Frequently the graphics showing heat (from 60N-70N) is also given extra warming trend by choosing a cold start point around 1950-60 or by using reference temperatures as the cold Arctic period 1950-80 where Arctic temperatures where a lot lower than the warm years 1925-45. These methods yields an Arctic warming trend of 2-5 degrees Celsius per 100 years, typically illustrated as glowing dark red areas for Arctic temperature trends – quite scary. But the decline in temperatures after 1940 has been avoided.

Below is an often used graphic from NASA, temperature trends with 1951-80 as reference. The reader will never in a hundred years guess, that there was no warmer in the Arctic today than there was around 1925-45:

Below a row of Arctic temperatures from Sibirias north coast. This graphic shows the temperature stations not used by CRU even though they where quite available for CRU and large areas in North Sibiria as a result is not represented in CRU temperature data sets. The temperatures shows no warming from around 1940 till today, in fact today’s temperature still haven’t fully reached the 1940 level:

Comments

HadCRUT3 combines the CRUTEM3 (land) and HadSST2 (sea) data sets.
The problem is that there are no reliable sea temps in the Arctic prior to mid 1940s

The CRUTEM3 (land) and HadSST2 (sea) data sets can be plotted at http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/climate.aspx

If you plot the average HadSST2 north of 70 for all grids with data before 1930, you see that there are no continuous records.
Therefore the HadCRUT3 plot for that timeframe came from the land data (CRUTEM3).

If you plot the CRUTEM3 north of 70 for all grids with data that go back as far as 1915, you find 4.
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/climgraph.aspx?pltparms=HCRUG100AJanDecI188020090900410AR70-75N:55-60W%20%20x70-75N:35-30E%20%20x75-80N:15-10E%20%20x75-80N:20-15E%20%20x

Of the 4 there are basically 2 pairs that are somewhat different from each other. 2 start in 1910 (these are in Norway) and 2 start before 1880 (these are in Greenland).

Kevin Trenberth to Michael Mann, Oct 12, 2009:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Kevin Trenberth to Tom Wigley, Oct 14, 2009

Hi Tom
How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where
energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not
close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is
happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as
we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!
Kevin

Leo Tolstoy

“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

Phil Jones

“We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.” -

Phil Jones to Michael Mann Feb 21, 2005:

The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick.
Leave it to you to delete as appropriate !
Cheers
Phil
PS I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data.
Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !

Tom Wigley to Phil Jones Sep 27, 2009:

If you look at the attached plot you will see that the
land also shows the 1940s blip (as I'm sure you know).
So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC,
then this would be significant for the global mean — but
we'd still have to explain the land blip.
I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an
ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of
ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common
forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of
these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are
1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity
plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things
consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.
Removing ENSO does not affect this.
It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip,
but we are still left with "why the blip".
Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol
effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced
ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling
in the NH — just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols.
The other interesting thing is (as Foukal et al. note — from
MAGICC) that the 1910-40 warming cannot be solar. The Sun can
get at most 10% of this with Wang et al solar, less with Foukal
solar. So this may well be NADW, as Sarah and I noted in 1987
(and also Schlesinger later). A reduced SST blip in the 1940s
makes the 1910-40 warming larger than the SH (which it
currently is not) — but not really enough.
So ... why was the SH so cold around 1910? Another SST problem?
(SH/NH data also attached.)
This stuff is in a report I am writing for EPRI, so I'd
appreciate any comments you (and Ben) might have.
Tom.

Tim Osborn to Michael Mann and Ian Macadam , Oct 5, 1999:

Dear Mike and Ian
Keith has asked me to send you a timeseries for the IPCC multi-proxy
reconstruction figure, to replace the one you currently have. The data are
attached to this e-mail. They go from 1402 to 1995, although we usually
stop the series in 1960 because of the recent non-temperature signal that
is superimposed on the tree-ring data that we use. I haven't put a 40-yr
smoothing through them - I thought it best if you were to do this to ensure
the same filter was used for all curves.

Keith Briffa:

Briffa:
> For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually
>warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming
>is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth
>was probably matched about 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global
>mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of
>years as Mike appears to and I contend that that there is strong evidence
>for major changes in climate over the Holocene (not Milankovich) that
>require explanation and that could represent part of the current or future
>background variability of our climate. I think the Venice meeting will be
>a good place to air these isssues.